You know, after commenting on the Ruby on Rails posts I made about the systems my team works on, it probably makes sense to let you know about one of them.
At Izea we’ve done a lot of work with Javascript over the years. We use it to deliver blog sponsorships from SocialSpark, our affiliate programs like ReviewMyPost from PayPerPost, and of course we use it to track blog metrics at IzeaRanks. Collectively the set of Javascript that does all this is known as ITK, or Izea Toolkit. ITK3 is called Cloudshout and I’m pretty excited about it.
Ok – I hear the groans. Yet another Widget framework. So what?
We focussed on a number of areas with Cloudshout. First, communication. We wanted a way to let developers build widgets that enable interaction on a blog. You could visit a blog with a Cloudshout chat widget on for example and start chatting, real time, with everyone else currently at the blog. Imagine that – no more waiting for comments to get approved then checking back every hour or so to see if there’s a conversation taking place that you’re a part of. It’s live, it’s right there in front of you. We’re also exposing a friendship system so that any Cloudshout widget can identify who a blog reader’s friends are and connect them (chat, gaming, etc ).
Second, we wanted readers of blogs to be able to take widgets with them. Maybe someone wrote a cool Alarm clock widget that you use to track how long you’ve got till the spouse comes a knocking. AS you travel around blogs, that alarm clock widget can follow you.
Third, Cloudshout gives developers a way to get found, and gives blog owners a way to find widgets and install them. It you have the ITK on your blog you just head over to the Cloudshout library, choose widgets that interest you and BAM – they appear on your blog straight away. No futzing around in source code. As a developer this is pretty neat too since there’s a central repository that everyone can go to discover your work.
Izea’s also going to handle the hosting of these widgets, and we’ll be using our CDN to deliver them, so the hurdles you’d normally have to leap (setting up a host for your widget to talk to, distributing it, etc etc) is all offloaded onto us.
Cloudshout also gives developers a way to make money from their work. If you have want to give up space in your widget design for an ad, we’ll serve the ads and pay you. The blogger gets paid too since they’re hosting your widget. Right a really popular widget and you could soon be raking in the cash as more and more blogs pick up on it and more ads get served through it.
We’re still a couple of weeks away from opening the whole thing up to everyone, but head on over to Cloudshout and sign up if you want to be notified when we have slots in available in the Alpha program.
